Why do people have different tastes in music?
A mathematical solution like 2+2=4 can be universally agreed upon, yet the number one album or song is different amongst everyone and even disputed.
>when STEMfags try to understand art
How you experience music is determined by what music you've listened to in the past, and what fits your personal brand. For everyone to agree objectively on a song, at minimum, you would have to make everyone listen to every song ever made.
> Why do people have different tastes in music?
Why wouldn't they? People have different cultural backgrounds and different life experiences which shape their interests and preferences. No two human brains are entirely alike either.
I'm not even sure why anyone likes music in the first place. If you think about it, most other forms of art have some sort of analogy in the real world. Visual art looks like something you might see in the real world. Stories and literature are like imagining possible events that could happen in the real world. But when do you ever encounter music just in nature? The closest thing would be a birdsong, but that's just a super short repeated phrase. Where do we get the inclination to enjoy long melodies and harmonies and what not?
Music seems like the most abstract form of art because it's not really trying to represent anything from the "real world." It's just a totally seperate thing and no one even knows why they like it.
>>63249726
I think it has to do with math and how our brains react to patterns and shit
>>63249638
throughout my families life, we listened to old psychedelic rock
My sister listens to kesha, lady gaga, and pop punk
>>63249638
This. Taste can be ultimately determined by personality, and personality is molded by the sum of your experiences, or in this case, what music you've listened to.
People who have been exposed to the same thing and have had similar experiences will listen to more or less the same music. If their experiences and what they've been exposed to differentiate, then they'll most likely not enjoy the same thing.
>>63249894
well that's the reason obviously
>>63249894
>No two human brains are entirely alike either.
>>63250037
That wasn't the post he replied to
>>63249726
>when do you ever encounter music just in nature?
What.The.Fuck. Literally everywhere you moron, music appeared because the prehistoric man tried to emulate the sounds that surrounded him. The nature, the animals, the wind, the rain, etc. We can listen to sounds, and we get an emotional response out of them vibrations, so we're musical beings by default.
>>63250087
You forgot to mention our fucking voices as well.
>>63250087
None of that sounds like a scale or a melody to me though. If you play someone a bunch of random sounds from nature, they're not gonna want to listen to it on any sort of regular basis. It's not interesting in the way that music is interesting.
>>63250242
>he doesn't listen to tribal ambient
>>63250284
I'm just saying, for the vast majority of people, they want to hear something that sounds like conventional music. And music is full of structures like scales and chords. Where did those come from? They're not representing anything from the real world. There's no analogy in the real world to a scale, a chord, or anything even remotely similar.
>>63250336
>There's no analogy in the real world to a scale, a chord, or anything even remotely similar.
>>63249608
Because quantity is objective but quality is subjective
>>63250242
I learned from this book that even if someone comes from a culture in which traditional melodies and stuff are absent, they can recognize that minor chords sound brooding or sad and major chords sound happy or triumphant.
It also talks about how regardless of where they come from, people's voices follow rough minor scales when they're sad, and major scales when they're happy. They also talk slower when sad, while they'll talk faster when happy or excited.
>>63250505
I also remember from the book that constant rhythms in nature are usually absent and can only be made artificially, so a long long time ago, when we were cavemen out in the wilderness, it was calming to us to hear a constant rhythm because meant that other humans had to be near by.
Music isn't something that came from nowhere, senpai.
>>63250564
Crazy, I should read that. I'm not saying it came from nowhere, I just can't see a direct link like the way that visual art was clearly a representation of how things look, or a play in a theater is a representation of some events that could possibly happen. Everything else seems pretty normal compared to music, which is just these complex structures that seem to come out of nowhere, kind of like pure mathematics where you start building up these logical rules and eventually you have this huge system that doesn't seem to relate to the real world in any way, like a parallel universe. With a lot of math it's not so much like it's being created as it's being discovered or explored.
>>63250336
But that's not true, Western scales are just successions of perfect fifths, which is the simplest interval in the harmonic series besides the octave. A major triad is also what you get if you play the first five notes in the harmonic series together and compress it into a single octave, while a minor triad is what you get if you invert that.
>>63250612
If you listen to folk music from "primitive" cultures, it's easy to understand how there is a direct link. The pounding of a drum reminds one of the stomping of feet in a hunt and gets you all riled up, and the vocals in a song of lament reminds one of the sound of weeping and makes you emotional in response. It's just that music is so old and has evolved so much over time it's transformed into something very autonomous from the sounds of "the real world". Painting has veered into abstraction many times, and unconventional narratives aren't unusual to find, so it really isn't surprising that something like music can become the way it is now.
>>63250681
And you've heard perfect fifths in nature? In any case, there's a lot more to music than just major and minor triads, think of chord progressions and melodies on top of those, they're enormously complicated compared to any sounds you'd hear in nature.
>>63250694
Yeah but abstract painting doesn't really have rules the way music has rules. The equivalent would be if almost all painting was abstract, but it also almost all adhered to the same set of seemingly arbitrary rules and guidelines that didn't represent anything from the real world, but which everyone seemingly enjoyed even though they didn't know why. Sounds weird, right?
>>63250733
this way he's a philistine and a fool
>>63250754
Good bastract painting still follows the rules of color theory and composition. Also, the rules of music aren't completely rigid. For once, what is defined as a dissonant harmony 400 years ago is very different than what it was defined as 200 years ago and different from what we would define it now. Also, different cultures have very different forms of music theory.
It's not really disputed, though. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are held as the three most important composers, in that order, almost universally. In pop music, the Beatles are looked at in a similar way. In jazz music you have Miles Davis. In hip hop you have Biggie and 2pac. It's not really a mystery who the most influential musicians are, and influence is the measure of art's importance.
>when a retarded question prompts an interesting discussion
It's based off of experience, there's been a lot of studies that say it's nothing genetic. The music you grow up around influences what you think you enjoy.
music appeals to emotion
emotions exist in a wide variety of types and magnitudes
the emotions a person is capable of relating to depend on his innate disposition, his upbringing, his life experience, and his capacity for empathy
another factor is how fastidious a person is. some people, usually by innate disposition, are very particular in their tastes and hold things to high standards, so that while a particular type of music may appeal to their sensibilities, they are very particular about which expressions of that type they find acceptable.
>>63252014
Fuck off faggot.
>>63250087
This is just a romantic lie pretty much. Music theory is a lot more constructed than literature or visual arts.
>>63250726
It's the overtone scale, I don't understand it too well but pretty much any tuned sound also produces a fifth and then a row going up from there growing more and more dissonant or something like that.
>>63250726
>And you've heard perfect fifths in nature?
Define "nature".
They're an essential part of physics, at least.
>In any case, there's a lot more to music than just major and minor triads, think of chord progressions and melodies on top of those, they're enormously complicated compared to any sounds you'd hear in nature.
Of course. I'm not suggesting you can hear a Bach fugue just by taking a walk in the woods, I'm just saying there's nothing arbitrary about western music theory.
>>63249618
Tfw stem and goal is to be successful, have decent taste in art and not go full autism. Gonna keep you up to date senpai but psure I'm either gonna go full autismo or anherismo trying.
>>63249608
Music isn't 2+2=4, it's X+Y=4, there are multiple options possible for X&Y, just like there are multiple opinions possible for an album.
>>63249618
Topkek, STEM people are best artfags
>>63249608
>Why are people different?
>>63250733
he's actually right there though
>>63253273
I feel like it would have been a statistical impossibility to get through modernism without someone making a silent piece and I'm glad it was a hippy like Cage instead of some annoying intellectual german.
>>63252312
what do you dislike about my post
>>63253402
the question is whether it is shit or not, not whether it was bound to happen or not
>>63249608
>Why do people have different tastes in music?
Because some people are patricians and others are plebs.
>>63253788
I think it's sort of interesting. First of all there's the gimmick aspect to it, but there's also the betrayal of expectations, and finally there's the philosophy that any snippet of sound can be beautiful if we take the time to listen. For being literally nothing at all I think that's a decent effort.
>>63254069
>For being literally nothing at all I think that's a decent effort.
what
> there's the philosophy that any snippet of sound can be beautiful if we take the time to listen
idgi man, that's exactly what i don't like about it. that point of view makes no sense to me and seems patently false
>betrayal of expectations
that i kind of get, but that would mean it could only work once. you cant have performances of it where people already know what's coming
>>63254223
>idgi man, that's exactly what i don't like about it. that point of view makes no sense to me and seems patently false
This is Cages philosophy though, you have to try to understand it if you want to appreciate his music on his terms. Personally I don't enjoy his music all that much, but I recognize he is a key figure in music history and pretty directly contributed to music I enjoy, like In C. I think his philosophy is beautiful, but I don't really experience it as being true.
>>63254346
if he was a true edgemaster he would play recordings of people farting
>>63254538
John Cage isn't a true edgemaster, he's a hippie.
>>63254223
>>63254346
you can make anything art by thinking deeply about it
4'33'' is legitimately good because it confronts you and forces you to think
